The Falcon Lake Incident (1967): The Man Burned by a UFO

On May 20, 1967, Stefan Michalak, an industrial mechanic and amateur prospector from Winnipeg, was examining a quartz vein near Falcon Lake in Whiteshell Provincial Park when two disc-shaped objects descended; one flew off and the other landed on a rock outcrop nearby. He watched it for about half an hour, sketched it, and heard voices from an opening in its side, which he addressed in several languages, thinking it a secret aircraft. Reaching in, he saw panels of light; the craft rotated, and a grid of vents on its side vented hot gas that set his shirt alight and burned his chest.

Michalak made his way back to the town with a pattern of round burns on his abdomen in a grid matching the vents he had described. In the following days he suffered nausea, headaches, and weight loss, and the burn pattern was photographed and examined by doctors. Reports of radioactivity at the site and on his clothing were made and later questioned.

The RCMP, the Royal Canadian Air Force, and the Department of National Defence investigated, as did the University of Colorado's Condon Committee, then compiling its report for the U.S. Air Force. None found evidence of a hoax and none found an explanation; the Condon Report listed it as unexplained while doubting it. Michalak, who sought no fame and disliked the attention, never changed his account before his death in 1999, and his son Stan co-authored a book, When They Appeared, in 2017.

In 2018 the Royal Canadian Mint issued a glow-in-the-dark commemorative coin of the Falcon Lake encounter, an unusual official acknowledgement. The case is one of very few with physical injuries examined by physicians at the time and documented in government files, which is why it appears in nearly every list of the most credible close encounters.